You can call anything a "green" job, and the more federal dollars that are available the more likely almost everything will be called green:
While the phrase "green jobs" evokes organic farmers and wind turbine repairmen, there is no clear, common definition of what a "green" job is. Without one, special-interest lobbying will transform even well-intentioned programmes. Consider corn-based ethanol, a technology with no redeeming features. Corn-based ethanol is bad for the environment, placing unsustainable demands on water supplies and increasing harmful farming practices. It is bad for people, raising corn prices for some of the world's poorest people. It provides little, if any, environmental benefit, with a net energy gain often close to or even below zero (the exact amount depends on the weather during the growing season, among other things). Yet corn-based ethanol has received billions in taxpayer support and continues to be favoured in so-called "green" energy legislation....
Via Nick Gillespie, who now works strictly for the Web version of his magazine: "You don't have to be The Amazing Kreskin to know that "green jobs" will become even more numerous the minute that money gets attached to any sort of definition, no matter how phony or fake. In fact, I think now that I no longer edit the tree-killing version of Reason, I'm a green jobber too, out here in the new media landscape where the cyber-birds and bees are buzzing and humming with nary an emission of greenhouse gases."
Comments
Leo:
And here I thought that all those GREEN JOBS used to consist of how many LAWNS aenterprising young man might cut in one afternoon during his youth...
(silly me)
;)
I'm afraid you're right. Merchants and manufacturers are throwing the adjective "green" on things the same way grocers and farmers throw "organic" around. The words have become virturally meaningless, in the absence of meaningful government standards (such as the "Energy Star" rating).
In the same vein, is anyone else here as appalled as I am that so many of those new, genuinely green, wind turbines and solar panels are being imported from China? Can't we at least give some targeted tax breaks that would encourage companies to actually build those things here in the United States?
What's the advantage of replacing Middle Eastern oil with Far Eastern solar cells? Not to mention the American workers who would be employed building those things. Even a good bit of our building insulation is imported from Asia. As a nation, we seem incapable of seeing more than three months into the future.
Littlejohn, due to government interference, regulation, and taxation, we cant manufacture sh&t in this country anymore.
Business bad-Government good.
Welcome to America 2010.
Tim:
I thought it was spelled AmeriKa?
Um, Tim, if you re-read my post, you'll note that I was proposing alterations in government policies, including tax breaks for American companies who make windmills and solar cells.
I'm not in favor of ill-advised universal tax hikes. I'm in favor of tax fairness, and that means breaks for industries we want to encourage.
I'm not really sure we're in disagreement here.
The only difference is I write in English; you write in Bumper-Sticker.
Tim, you're full of bunk. It's wages, not government regulation, that moves jobs out of this country. Plain and simple.
Amen, Lewis.
Research has shown government regulation, red tape, while it adds to the cost of doing business at times, it is chump change compared to what it costs to pay for workers here vs. in Korea or Pakistan or Mexico City. Now, if one of our posters wants to go off on a union rant and say our workers are overpaid, and they should be getting a lot less to compete with Filipino jobs, well that's a whole other discussion.
P.S. Every car I've ever owned has been American. People make fun of me for that.
AJ
Lewis:
To be even more specific..it's UNIONS that have sent our jobs elsewhere.
I predicted the union response, lol!
AJ
Its a combination of all the factors mentioned above, between the govt & the unions you don't stand a chance if you want to manufacture a product.
You can build a factory in China for 5 million or stay here and build it for 25 million, what would you do?